Better Political Balance Begins With Open Primaries

Open primaries for GOP candidates? Only if party wants to win more seats

Connecticut's Republican Party made gains in last November's election, picking up 10 seats in the state House of Representatives. That's heartening if you believe that state government works better when one party doesn't have a lock on it.

Beyond that, gains were nil, and another GOP party chairman is in trouble.

Republicans need to pump up their numbers of registered voters a lot more before any meaningful sort of partisan balance in this state can be achieved and the prevailing stagnant political atmosphere is reinvigorated with the yeast of competition.

Open primary elections — now being considered by a state GOP subcommittee on election reform — is one promising avenue to growth.

And an increasing number of Republicans seem interested in revisiting this reform, long championed by former Republican and former governor and U.S. senator Lowell P. Weicker.

Nineteen states have open primaries.

As it stands, Republicans are a small and lagging portion of the state's political herd. There are 818,389 registered unaffiliated voters and 712,985 Democrats in Connecticut as of the last counting. The number of voters registered Republican — 407,520 — pales by comparison.

Democratic bigwigs are complacent about their second-place standing in registered voters and seem to see no need for making a play for the unaffiliated. The Democrats already "have a diverse party," says a spokesman for Senate President Martin Looney, Democrat of New Haven.

All the more reason, then, that Republicans should prevail upon their state central committee to change the party bylaws to allow unaffiliated voters to vote in Republican primary elections

Perhaps that exposure would attract some of the unaffiliated into GOP ranks.

Jim Campbell, the Republican town chairman in Greenwich, told the Connecticut Post why he favors open primaries: "As Republicans, we win elections only when we win the majority of the unaffiliated vote."